BU Research Blog

A while back I posted looking for comments on which research ontology to use in order to drive our ‘find an expert’ search engine both for external and crucially for internal users.  How can we increase collaboration in BU if we can’t find each other and seek out the expertise we need?  The find an expert function will help with this.  To help the search engine we need to classify our expertise against some form of research taxonomy or ontology; basically a list of subjects and expertise.  In the original post I favoured the Science Metrix subject list as a simple solution.  The alternative is the Library of Congress list which is much more exhaustive and Holger Schutkowski (Applied Sciences) has made a strong plea via his blog posts for this with the idea that we could edit this list down to something more managable, essentially removing those subject areas that we simply do not have at BU.  I am keen to take a decision on this soon so any further views would be very much appreciated.  May be there is an alternative ontology that we should consider for example.